Asylum interviews as a fictional device in two Iraqi narrative works

In a 2011 article, UNHCR judge Hélène Isnard asked whether refugees’ official reports about their personal experience should be treated as fiction. The asylum interview, on the other hand, has been frequently employed as a narrative device in many refugee’s narratives. This paper will discuss fictional uses of pseudofactual interviews in two works by Iraqi writers who sought asylum in Europe at different historical times. In its mainly autobiographical writing, Ṣamūʾīl Šamʿūn’s ʿIrāqī fī Bārīs (2012) condenses the account of his journey to Europe, in the 1980s, in an opening «Report [Taqrīr] to the Asylum Department in France». Ḥasan Blāsim’s short story «al-Aršīf wa-l-wāqiʿ», first published in Maǧnūn Sāḥat al-Ḥurriyya (2015) presents a fictional account of a kafkaesque interview to a mentally ill asylum seeker fleeing from post-2003 civil war. By comparing and contrasting the two works, the paper will focus on the (un)reliability of the two narrators in their double communication to the immigration officials (as narratees) and the authorial audience. This textual analysis will provide an opportunity to address broader questions about fictionality and testimoniality in this pseudofactual refugee fiction.